Daylong Teaching: Grief Not Learned -Portland, OR

May 18, 2013 @ 9:30 am - 3:30 pm

|$135

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The long dark shadow of being from nowhere:

« It is a necessary and proper thing that all of us learn about grief and death, about dying, about all of the before and the after, well before the time of being tested and told comes. »
From a young age we see around us that grief is mostly an affliction, a misery that intrudes into the life we deserve, a rupture of the natural order of things, a trauma that we need coping and management and five stages and twelve steps to get over. Here’s the revolution: What if grief is a skill, in the same way that love is a skill, something that must be learned and cultivated and taught? What if grief is the natural order of things, a way of loving life anyway? Grief and the love of life are twins, natural human skills that can be learned first by being on the receiving end and feeling worthy of them, later by practicing them when you run short of understanding. In a time like ours, grieving is a subversive act.
Most dying people’s fear of what will become of them is bound up with their fear of what we will do with them after they die. They fear most our ability to live, eventually, as if they’d never been. This is the exponential consequence of living without ancestors, that we may have lost the ability to become one. The willingness to remember great sorrow, unsuspected loss, blank pages in the story of who we are, this is grief in action. This teaching speaks to the skills of personal grief and ancestral grief, in particular their redemptive power in learning and claiming ancestry for personal story. With grief learned we have ancestors to die unto.Link to Griefwalker video clips: https://orphanwisdom.com/griefwalker/ – Public screening on Fri.May 17FOR MORE INFORMATION, Contact: Karen Paule, Email kapaule@hotmail.com .FEE: $135 (Early-bird Fee: $110 when paid in full before April 20, 2013)Marylhurst students! please contact Karen for discount details
Pre-purchase of ticket strongly encouraged.Online registration/ payment available via Eventbrite, below.VENUE: Marylhurst University in the Flavia Salon, 17600 Pacific Hwy, Marylhurst, OR 9703615 minutes from downtown Portland!Bring a cup/ thermos for your tea and bring your lunch (or food is available on campus).